Dynamic UAV Re-Route Interface for Conflict-Free Flight Paths
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Solution Overview
Problem
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) face challenges in dynamically re-routing around unexpected conflicts during flights, as human operators may lack time or expertise to manually select conflict-free routes, potentially leading to secondary conflicts and the need for collision avoidance systems.
Innovation Solution
A dynamic re-routing unit within an unmanned traffic management (UTM) network identifies and presents multiple alternate flight plans to the operator, considering factors like risk, time, and cost, allowing for real-time adjustments to avoid conflicts and minimize secondary issues.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a human operator manually re-routes a drone around a conflict, then the drone can avoid the conflict, but the operator may not have sufficient time to determine a new route and may lack expertise to ensure the new route is conflict-free
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an automated re-routing system that acts as an intermediary between the conflict detection mechanism and the drone's flight control. This intermediary automatically generates and evaluates multiple alternative routes, presenting them to the operator for selection, thereby eliminating the time constraint and expertise requirement for manual route determination while maintaining reliability through automated conflict checking
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-calculating multiple alternative routes before the operator needs to make a decision. When a conflict is detected, the system has already prepared several viable alternative paths with evaluated metrics, allowing the operator to simply select from pre-prepared options rather than determining a new route from scratch under time pressure
2Ease of operation
If multiple alternate routes are presented to the operator for selection, then the operator can choose a preferred route, but the system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the complex re-routing task into distinct modular components: conflict detection module, route generation module, route evaluation module, and route presentation module. Each module handles a specific aspect of the re-routing process, making the overall system more manageable and maintainable despite the increased functionality required to present multiple alternate routes
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses parameter changes to manage complexity by evaluating and ranking alternative routes based on multiple parameters such as flight time, distance, fuel consumption, and safety margins. By changing and comparing these parameters systematically, the system can present a manageable number of optimized alternatives to the operator without requiring the operator to evaluate all possible routes
Data Source
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AI summary
A method may include detecting (400), during a flight of an aircraft system, a conflict with a planned route of the aircraft system, determining (402) one or more alternate routes for the aircraft system to avoid the conflict, wherein each of the one or more alternate routes avoid secondary conflicts with active flight operations, transmitting (412) first data to cause first visual information indicating the conflict and second visual information indicating the one or more alternate routes to be displayed to a user, receiving (414) second data indicating one of the one or more alternate routes being selected by the user, and updating (416) the planned route of the aircraft system to include the alternate route selected by the user.